"It couldn't make head or tail. And what's more, there was no way to understand..." - this could be an assessment of not very effective communication. Yet today more than ever, fast, clear and understandable electronic communication is a top priority in business and personal life. So let's take a look at the types of online communication available to you and how to communicate properly and effectively - internally and with customers and business partners.
In today's connected digital world, electronic communication is an essential part of our personal and professional lives. Effective communication enables companies to collaborate, build business relationships and maintain contact with customers and business partners.
What is digital (online or electronic) communication? In purely cyber terms, it is a type of exchange of information that is discontinuous numerical in nature (in layman's terms, "ones and zeros"). From a more practical point of view, digital communication can be defined as a company's or firm's attempt to communicate online through one or more communication channels - from email and chat to telephony and the use of contact centres.
Electronic communication is basically divided according to synchronicity:
Another way to divide digital communication is based on the form of information exchange:
The most popular - and most widely used - online communication tools are listed again according to the categories mentioned above:
We only provide this bare list for a basic overview, as we have already described each application and platform in detail in a separate article Types of online communication: which platform is optimal for you?
We explained what digital communication is and which tools to use for it. Let's now focus on tips on how to communicate effectively. But we don't want to play the self-proclaimed "digital Ladislav Špaček" - we're certainly no arbiter of electronic etiquette. Therefore, do not take the following tips as rigid or even binding rules of communication, but rather as a set of recommendations for effective communication. And if some of the tips seem obvious to you, then see them as reassurance, for example.
→ Tip: Check out How to Microsoft Outlook - email from the left back.
What is UC - unified digital communications? It is a platform that streamlines and unifies the various channels and means of corporate communication. So you don't need to use multiple communication channels simultaneously - you only need one. In principle, UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) can be considered a kind of cloud computing - unified communication services are made available by a cloud provider.
What makes this type of digital communication interesting? In addition to user simplification and higher reliability of voice services, it brings economic benefits: instead of costly maintenance of your own communication infrastructure, you switch to a more favorable operating cost model (OpEx).
To say that information and communications technology is evolving ever faster would be like bringing owls to Athens (or chips to Sillicon Valley). However, from an online communications perspective, it is worth pointing out a few important trends. At the very least, the fact that in some respects the computer can do the actual communicating for us. In many ways, it does this more efficiently than a human.
NLP is one of the branches of artificial intelligence and is closely related to NLU (Natural Language Understanding). NLU is a field focused on machine "understanding" of the actual meaning of text. That is, not just based on keywords, but on understanding the actual context. NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithms can process human natural language through machine learning. With natural language processing applications, you can analyze text and extract information from various sources such as chat messages. An example is the NICE app, which analyzes and processes written customer messages from different communication channels and can automatically send an appropriate response within seconds without human operator intervention.
Do you feel you can make a good guess about the speaker's emotions and intentions? And can you do this even if it is a trained and experienced speaker? Advanced voice analysis algorithms can do it! Voice analysis is a process in which specialized software identifies several hundred parameters related to the speaker's feelings and affective states based on a mathematical model in real time.
Sophisticated voice analysis algorithms can even detect different nuances in speech and different kinds of pauses (for example, silence due to the speaker thinking about how to express disagreement or wanting to say something but not saying it because they are afraid it might be awkward or strange).
Voice analytics will be increasingly used in contact and call centres, where it can be very effective in helping not only the operators and agents themselves, but also their supervisors.
5G networks are the current phenomenon in digital communications. Fortunately, it's not that they're spreading viruses infecting the poor population (as the disinformers tried to tell us during the covid epidemic), but because of their truly robust technical characteristics.
The 5G network builds on the already established foundations of LTE and 4G networks and enables much faster messaging, video calling and data transfer. This network has the potential to reach transmission speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second. By the end of next year, the number of mobile operators investing in standalone 5G networks is expected to double to at least 200 companies.
With the rapid development of digitalisation, the implementation of 5G networks is clearly a necessary step that will lead to significant improvements in capacity, speed and connectivity between consumers, devices, technologies, industrial sites and transport.
Do you find the constant drumbeat of information about artificial intelligence that is currently pouring in from all sides a bit annoying? But did you know that companies that have combined the use of AI with human operators in contact centres have seen a 61% increase in customer satisfaction? Human operators themselves then reported a 69% increase in satisfaction with their own jobs.
A specific application of AI in digital communication is chatbots - communication programs that are successfully deployed in customer service lines and contact centers. They are easily accessible and can save up to 30% of costs. Chatbots have a promising future ahead of them and are growing in importance, especially in the customer care sector. Most companies across various industries are already actively using chatbots or have plans to actively deploy them in the near future.
At Algotech, we have been systematically working with telecommunications equipment and digital communications for over 25 years. For internal communication in the company we implement the Avaya Spaces solution, which is ideal not only as a project management tool, but also for the activities of multiple teams from different branches, home office work and distance learning - in addition to the possibility of integration with other applications.
Do you run a call centre? We provide both hardware and software that we are happy to customize for any contact center with inbound or outbound communication over any channel. Easily handle messages, phone calls, emails, video calls - we can arrange for automated chatbot support on most communication channels.
Contact us and put your online communication worries behind you. Spend your time on your business, we'll handle all the essentials for you - from analysis to implementation to monitoring.
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